Quintica transforms IT efficiency at UASC

A Middle East IT service management firm has helped one of the region’s leading shipping companies improve their efficiency by automating their manual incident handling and service desk operations.

Quintica Middle East, an IT service management and training firm has dramatically improved the IT efficiency of the United Arab Shipping Company by using BMC RemedyForce via Salesforce.com, a cloud-based solution.

The automation and subsequent training has significantly increased UASC’s quality and speed of their incident handling while significantly reducing incident-related calls, saving it time, money and its brand’s reputation.

“We are very pleased to see IT-driven enhancements and training bringing our customers such tangible business benefits. We hope to help many more companies address the critical areas they feel are holding them back so they can bring out their best,” said Bryan MacKenzie, Managing Director at Quintica.

Prior to this project, UASC used a somewhat unreliable manual email system to coordinate their service desk operations.

Tracking the progress, handoff and closure of service issues between multiple participants was subject to errors, resulting in the loss of emails and unsatisfactory follow up especially during times of peak activity.

UASC called on Quintica to bring the reliability and performance of UASC’s service desk up to the high standards of the rest of their systems, as this critical function was seen to be holding back improvements in the quality of their technical service delivery.

Quintica began the project by performing an assessment of the existing IT systems and policies to identify their linkages, deficiencies and new user expectations. The consultants then formulated a solution utilising ITIL best practices.

The plan was to replace manual emails, automating the service management processes using BMC’s RemedyForce application that is delivered on the “cloud” using Salesforce.com.

With RemedyForce users can view performance statistics that give managers at UASC the transparency they wanted.

SalesForce.com was already an application that the company’s personnel knew, so deploying this way reduced the training they needed and made it easier for them to adapt to the new system.

Financial impact was a key consideration for UASC.

“We chose RemedyForce on the advice of Quintica over competing solutions for three key reasons: cost, functionality and BMC Software’s position as a market leader”, said Kris Vedat, Head of Service Level Management at UASC.

RemedyForce Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model is subscription-based, with no up front purchase needed. This suited UASC who preferred operational expense over the capex required in a typical on-premise enterprise solution.

Quintica rolled out its implementation in phases so as not to disrupt the service operations and mitigate any unexpected risks. In terms of how the new system was received, Vedat noted, “Changing the mind-set of users was perhaps the biggest challenge we faced in ensuring a successful rollout. But when people began to experience the advantages of the new solution over before, they readily embraced RemedyForce.”

By the end of the project, the levels of service achieved by UASC have become consistent enough that it has started establishing service level agreements with its customers.

Also - to ensure the continued improvement of processes and staff buy-in - Quintica have been hosting regular awareness sessions, WebEx training and other enablement sessions.